Call of Duty Ghosts review: Is Infinity Ward's latest game still the sharpest shooter in town?

Call of Duty: Ghosts

Call of Duty generalissimo Mark Rubin’s recent comment that people who play his title are not hardcore gamers was met with raised eyebrows and withering sighs across the internet’s specialist outposts, but he had a point.

Of course a significant number of the millions who fork out their fifty pounds each year are, but for many COD campaigns have become the new blockbusters, action spectaculars to enjoy in the same way they would any of Hollywood’s tentpole cinema releases. And Ghosts arguably delivers the biggest bangs for that audience’s buck yet.

Single player

Liberated from the thematic restraints of the Modern Warfare trilogy and empowered by the graphical shock and awe of next gen consoles, Infinity Ward have seemingly thrown everything against the wall to see what explodes.

In the single player campaign you’ll take part in a zero gravity shootout on a space station, survive a missile attack on San Diego while the walls literally come down around you, and run covert ops in a nightmarish near future Los Angeles occupied by a shadowy South American force called the Federation - and all within the first 30 minutes.

What follows delicately strafes the line between wondrous widescreen set pieces - an all-out Dunkirk-style assault on Santa Monica beach, an Apocalypse Now-esque helicopter attack on a fortified city, or the apocalyptic climax involving enough tanks to make Battlefield blush - and more character-centric sequences that come closer to capturing the essence of a Bond movie than any of Activision’s official tie-ins.

It would be wrong to call Ghosts’ campaign groundbreaking - you’re still, essentially, running around pointing a gun at someone after all - but Infinity Ward have certainly taken pains to vary the pace. The Hunted, an episode in which you have to stealthily traverse an incredibly lush jungle setting, guided only by the ping of a motion tracker, is surprisingly tense and atmospheric. A desperate stand inside a missile factory in the Andes, meanwhile, triggers a challenging tower defence segment. There are still plenty of scripted sequences, of course, but Ghosts feels much less about following and more about doing.

The plot is predictably preposterous popcorn nonsense about an elite group of father and son soldiers and some levels have blatantly been crowbarred in both to pad out the six hour running time but also just to allow Infinity Ward to do something spectacularly cool, like blowing up a huge floating oil platform. And the less said about Riley, the remote controlled attack dog who accompanies you on several levels, the better.

Multiplayer

Single player isn’t even half the story here, though. Significant numbers of, yes, hardcore COD commandos don’t even bother with it, diving straight in to multiplayer instead. And here Infinity Ward have excelled again. There are so many modes and maps available straight out of the box that it's difficult to know where to begin.

As a rule, maps are bigger, more intricate and much more open, with cramped corridors replaced by natural nooks and crannies, and environmental effects that range from player controlled doors to explosions that envelope the playing area in cloying clouds of dust and debris.

The revised levelling, perks and score streaks systems feel more fairly balanced, but until the game is out in the wild it’s difficult to pass definitive judgement.

Similarly, time will tell which of the new modes become community favourites but standouts include Search and Rescue (not to be confused with Search and Destroy), in which players are eliminated from the round if their dog tags fall into enemy hands, and Grind, which takes the basic premise of Kill Confirmed but requires you to return the tags to one of two communal banks.

Party players will get a kick out of Infected, a last man standing style mode in which one player must infect all of the others, and Hunted, which starts everyone with a pistol and then drops random weapon crates onto the map at regular intervals.

Squads and Extinction

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are two new entirely separate game types as well. Squads is a bot-enhanced multiplayer in which you train and level up your own team of Ghosts, selecting their load outs and playstyles before joining them in battle against other players’ teams - even if they’re not actually online at the time. Initial impressions are that the AI is suspiciously good, and it remains to be seen how it evolves over time with you. But it’s certainly an interesting way of introducing some of those casual campaign fans to multiplayer who might otherwise be put off by the griefing and goofing around.

At the other end of the spectrum is Extinction, a four player, class-based co-op survival mode that is Infinity Ward’s answer to the Zombies in sister studio Treyarch’s Black Ops series. For reasons not entirely explained elsewhere, you face off against a series of increasingly aggressive aliens, earning cash for kills that can be spent on new weapons and perks. It’s intense and, initially at least, extremely challenging, playing like a cross between Gears of War 3’s enhanced Horde mode and Left 4 Dead.

Next gen

Infinity Ward certainly have challenges ahead of them as we move into the new console generation. Despite being developed simultaneously on both current and next gen hardware, Ghosts plays identically on both. Of course, the impressive power of the PlayStation 4 makes every bang bigger and every explosion more exciting than ever before, and the added level of detail is genuinely eye-popping. Play the same levels afterwards on a PS3, as I made a point of doing, and you’ll feel like you’ve suddenly developed cataracts.

The verdict

Ghosts’ campaign won't do much to win over the COD-sceptics but it's immensely enjoyable all the same, and arguably the franchise's most fun-to-play in years. The wealth of multiplayer options, meanwhile, makes a mockery of the much-cited criticism that Call of Duty is just the same product repackaged year after year.

However, players who have splashed out on new next gen hardware will be disappointed Infinity Ward couldn’t similarly enhance the content, and the pressure will be on Infinity Ward to deliver a genuinely next gen Call of Duty experience next time out.

For now, though, the overall Ghosts package hits almost all of its targets - for hardcore and casual shooters alike.